In the preceding Time for action — creating a group section, you discovered that when you create a new group, you can decide how to allocate membership for it. You saw that there are two main types of group in Mahara for a standard user:
- Open: Any user of the site can join your group, they don't need approval from a group admin.
- Request: Users can send requests to group admins to ask to join a group.
To get a better idea about how these different group types affect how people join your group, let's discuss each type in more detail and think up a few scenarios where they might be used.
When you choose to make an open membership group, you are opening your community up for participation by all registered site users. In making this decision, you are saying that you don't mind who joins your group and, in fact, that you want to encourage participation by as many users as possible. You are also giving your users the freedom to leave the group at any time. This group type is great for a community space where you want to encourage large numbers of people to join in and to participate in open discussion. Many of the groups on the mahara.org website for example are open membership. Why restrict community interaction unless you really need to?
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Neil from Training for Work thinks: | |
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I would like to set up a social area for my learners called "Sports". I want anyone to be able to participate without any restrictions on joining. I want joining up to be as simple as clicking a Join button for the group. Open membership seems to be the option I should go for. |
This is where you start to get more protective of your group. You aren't opening the group up to all users, but getting users to send a request — asking for your permission before they can join in. This is a good way of restricting group access to users who have an active interest in joining you. When users request to join your group, they can give a short description explaining why. You should think carefully before creating this group type because it means, potentially, that you will have to monitor and respond to lots of requests to join.
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Janet Norman from PI Inc. thinks: | |
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I'm really excited thinking about all the different groups I could make. I have already practiced by making a Clinical Trials group, but I have another idea — to have a company wide PI Inc. policy discussion group. I want to encourage those who are interested to join, but still maintain some control over the membership. |
These settings are a really useful way for users to organically spread the word about your group. Rather than the administrator of a group having to send out requests to all the people they would like to join, group members themselves can get in touch with their friends and let them know that they should join and get involved.
Often you're much more likely to join a group that a colleague or friend has told you about than a group administrator who you may not know in person. This can help your group and its community to grow more quickly.
So, which option should you choose since you can only tick one? Let's have a look at the difference between the two:
- Friend invitations: This gives your group members the freedom to invite their Mahara friends to join your group themselves. The invited friend can then decide to accept or decline the request. If they accept, they are auto-added to the group and the group admin doesn't have to do anything. This option also adds a button to Group homepage to allow members to invite friends.
- Recommendations: This puts a button on Group homepage, which allows group members to recommend the group to their Mahara friends. When the friend receives the recommendation, they then still need to join the group according to the group settings. So, they would need to request membership if it is a request group, for example. In this sense, a recommendation is less active then a friend invitation.
Both of the above options put a button on Group homepage. Using this button, you can invite group members to actively spread the word about your group to their friends.
The main difference between the two types is that friend invitations give group members the power to allow their friends directly into the group by accepting the invitation. With recommendations, the invited friends still have to go through the normal process before they're allowed in — if the group is open, this of course would mean that they can just join up as usual.
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Christophe from Silverworks University thinks: | |
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I'm going to create a Mahara group for my tutor group. I'm not that interested in the group being completely closed to just my tutor group members, though, I'm going to allow them to send friend invitations. This is so others can get in on the action and see what we've been doing. |
Regardless of which type of group you choose and how you allow your users to recommend your group, you are always able to invite anyone you like to join your group.
In Mahara, there are other group types and role allocations that are available only to administrators and staff members. These are known as controlled membership groups and course roles. Controlled groups allow you to oblige people to become members of your group without them responding to a request or deciding to join — they are instantly put into your group. Course roles allow you to set up different group roles, including tutors. Neil is an admin in his Mahara site and has indicated that he is interested in using controlled groups. See Chapter 6, Course Groups and Other Roles in Mahara, if you think this is what you want to do.
Note
Group categories
You may have found in the last activity that you had an additional option in the general group settings to add a group category. For you to see this, it would have to be set up by a group administrator. This option allows you to choose a general category for your group from the options that your admin has added. This can be really useful for people who want to search for your group from the find groups page as they can filter by category.
Now let's see what you can do in your new group.